Guest Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org
The New York Times has again given a platform to the voting machine vendors to voice their displeasure with a system that is forcing them to actually provide voting systems that are fully tested and certified. The vendors, and some election officials, seem to want to continue the old system of poorly tested and rubber-stamped voting systems counting our votes.
In his article, Ian Urbina, quotes Jennifer Brunner, who says:
If Brunner expects high quality and consistent standards, all she needs to do is look to the vendors and question them on why they put out a product that fails in testing. Her state’s recent countersuit of Premier/Diebold was a start, but why did she wait until she was sued by the vendor before taking that step? As we asked recently, why did she ignore the pleadings of Election Integrity Attorneys and computer scientists who counseled her to file a suit against Premier/Diebold for breach of contract for so long?
Brunner also needs to question the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) qualification system (most often referred to as “federal certification” by most officials and vendors) and those involved in the process as to why they allowed non-compliant voting systems to be given their stamp of approval on behalf of the federal government in the first place. If the so-called federal Independent Test Authorities and NASED had done their jobs prior to 2007, the machines used in Ohio and the rest of the nation would not now be constantly failing, and the voters would have far more confidence in the electoral system.
Doug Chapin of the Pew Center project electionline.org must have just come from last week’s Election Center conference, where election officials and vendor representatives gather and talk about issues of importance to the lucrative American Voting Industry. He is quoted in the Times with this remarkable comment…
The problem is not that “the pace of innovation is outstripping the pace of regulation,” but rather that the pace of “innovation” by the vendors has outstripped their technical ability.
If Diebold/Premier had not presented a voting system that had 79 flaws found during testing and 2 of those being fatal flaws, they might have one of their newer systems certified right now. All of the vendors seem to be having the same issues. Product certification testing is not supposed to be a system of doing alpha and beta testing for the vendors, yet that is what is clearly happening.
Alpha and beta tests are to be done by the vendors before the federal laboratory product testing, the final step towards federal certification, takes place. NASED allowed the flawed system in the past, and rubber stamped voting systems approved under flawed testing protocols.
The fact is, as Urbina reports, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has “said the current system left states on their own to discover voting machine problems. The report calls for Congress to revise the Help America Vote Act and provide the commission with the authority and resources it needs to resolve problems with machines that were certified before the commission took over the process.”
Urbina reports that Chris Nelson, Secretary of State in South Dakota, told him:
Why hasn’t the state of South Dakota taken the supplier of the state’s AutoMark ballot marking devices, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), to court for selling them flawed voting machines? Nelson admits that the state has been using those same flawed voting machines in every election to date since they found out they didn’t work properly. Apparently, he must not be concerned as to wether that the state’s disabilities community gets to have their ballots accurately counted. And what about every other state that uses those same machines; do they have the same problem? And what have they done about it except to ignore the fact that the problem even exists?
Then Urbina reports this:
Besides the obvious fact that no software on optical scan machines will affect the performance of those machines for disabled voters, as compared to non-disabled voters, there is, again, the acknowledgment of a jurisdiction admitting to using a voting system that they know does not accurately count the votes.
Officials in South Dakota and Chicago must be held accountable for knowingly using voting machines that do not accurately count the votes. The vendors must be held responsible for selling systems that do not accurately count the votes.
Yes, many states bought voting systems that need “bug fixes” and software updates. The question must be, why do they needs those fixes and updates? Why wasn’t their system working properly when they sold it? Why did the previous qualification system allow faulty voting systems to be put into the “voting market” in the first place? Perhaps someone needs to follow the money trail.
The real solution must be for congress to act on the GAO report and for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to begin to take action with regard to failing voting systems. In the mean time, counties and states need to plan on ensuring paper ballots are available in every polling place, in every election, in place of the flawed voting systems now in use across America.
Thanks John, for this timely rant. Somebody puh-leeze send this to the NYT writer. And glad to see a shout-out at
The Election Center…
They’re the guys who are vendor-supported. They throw an “election camp,” to teach government employees how to run their machines, as I remember, and they tell whoppers about the fine quality of vendors’ gear.
As a Tennessean, I’m SOOOO proud that out state Election Coordinator, Brook Thompson, is on their board. Huge conflict of interest (surprise, he instisted that our state have DREs and not scanners back in ’05, and has fought paper ballots every step of the way – and he’s a Democrat, by the way…) and our state media gives him a pass…
Bob Ney is out of the half way house now, maybe he could hep ya… 😛
Back before HAVA was passed, I wrote my Congresscritter to the effect that it would be a good thing if he opposed it, because “The State of the Art is not sufficiently advanced to guarantee accuracy. This being the case, there is room for all sorts of chicanery and just plain error. My son, a computer expert, tells me that touch screen machines are just plain unreliable. Please try to see that this misbegotten idea is not enacted, until technology can assure results at least as accurate as the old hand-marked paper ballots.” He replied that he had been assured that the accuracy of the new machines would be guaranteed by Federal testing procedures.” Of course, he was a Republican. He lost the seat in 2006. Why do congresscritterss ALWAYS think they know better than their constituents?
There is no way to find all the errors in a piece of software.
There s no way to be sure that a piece of software is free of malware.
Consider this, from SRI Professor Peter Neumann, one of the world’s leading computer scientists:
“Even if you can look at the source code, you can’t guarantee that there’s not a Trojan horse embedded somewhere in the code. Any self- respecting system programmer can hack the innards of the system to defeat encryption techniques or any password protection, or anything like that. All this stuff is trivial to break, for the most part. In most computer systems out there, it is child’s play. Given the fact that the underlying systems are so penetrable, it is relatively easy to fudge data-for example, to start out with three thousand votes for one guy and zero for the other before the counting even starts, even though
the counter shows zero. Essentially a Trojan horse in the coding. I can do it in the operating system. I can do it in the application program.
Or I can do it in the compiler. I can rig it so that all test decks work perfectly well….â€
Machine makers’ designs have proven appallingly bad at every independent study.
“Logic and Accuracy” tests are known to be altogether inadequate to locate errors or malware.
The conflict of interest between the NASED/EAC test firms and the makers has been demonstrated – most glaringly with respect to SysTest just recently.
The federal “standards” are shot through with exceptions and omissions – such as the provision that the EAC can waive requirements whenever it wishes…
John is right – if we want to continue with machines we have to do it right; makers have to be penalized for bad designs and officials have to be fired for failing to follow sound procedure.
But where is the political will to do this?
Hand count paper ballots…
Voting Machine Doubts Linger
What has happened since Florida 2000 is we’ve taken a problem that was a disaster for that election and made it exponentially worse.
John Bonifaz, legal director, Voter Action
’04 Election Apologists Still Unmoved By Mountain of Evidence: Columbus Dispatch Ignores Facts
August 13, 2008
Using NYT’s own words as a PHALLIC SYMBOL. You know the symbol used in conjunction with BOHICA?
“In some cases, election officials in need of new equipment have no choice but to buy machines that lack the current innovations and upgrades.”
Upgrades HA HA HA. Come on fucking NYT . I ain’t even a fucking journalist but I know enough to know to ask WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHY, WHERE and sometimes ask HOW, EXPLAIN, and REPEAT!
who upgrades
what get’s upgraded
when does it get upgraded??
why does it get upgraded?
where does it get upgraded?
could you fucking repeat that?
Maybe you didn’t get the part about electrons traveling at 3e8?
omfg. wtf!?
It’d be funny if it wasn’t so bad and directly responsible for causing every problem we currently have.
open thread?
how about a weekly open thread?
just asking.
This quote from the linked NYT article is simply stunning:
Seems to be saying that the integrity of the certification process is somehow more importamnt than the integrity of the actual vote count.
I could not agree more, I’m a Florida leftist who will cry myself to sleep as obama will win Florida and not win it because of the points in the article as well as democrat voter intimidation which is sad because in my county Miami dade its dirty to be a leftist…makes me envious of my west coast homeboys and my east coast homeboys both in them blue zones helping my other homeboy obama win the neo battleground of Penn …I hope pen woods don’t rigg the game like my state of fla does.
I said over a year ago that local governments would poor-mouth their way into using defective voting machines. I see they have found the way.
My son was talking about simple unreliability, not malice. He said, “All you have to do to change the results entirely is drop one parity bit, and a machine will apparently sometimes do that without help!” He thought that the state of the art was NEVER going to be up to handling the complexity of a Presidential election, with congresscritters and senators, county and city, and various propositions on the same ballot. He said, “You can’t blame the machines; they do what they are told – but PEOPLE sometimes tell them to do the damnedest things! You simply cannot trust people not to make mistakes.” There is SOME hope; when people futz around, TRYING to alter the results, the mistakes they make sometimes make the results SO skewed, that a blind pig could spot the problem. As, for instance, the several Ohio precincts in 2004 that reported “ZERO” Democratic votes – an impossibility – and the Indiana precinct that reported 20,000 Republican votes – when there were only 800 total registered voters – and – but why belabor it? RELIABILITY CAN NEVER BE INSURED, SO THE BEST THING TO DO IS SCRAP THE GARBAGE, AND START OVER WITH HAND-COUNTED PAPER! The ancient adage applies – “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” and a new appendage could be added; “If it’s broke past repair, don’t try!”
Well said.
NOW, the next thing is to have a system that ENCOURGAGES rather than discourages NEW VENDORS with new ideas (like us at Penvote [www.penvote.com].
It is VERY ODD that in Ohio there are only 3 vendors to buy from, but yet a 2 million dollar study shows their equipment is buggy and support is poor (in most cases). YET, those 3 vendors are the only ones that the state approves of. Why is that? Why are new vendors kept out?
Chris Wilson
Back in about 2004 or 2005 ex-SOS Blackwell told all vendors that he wanted contracts with them to allow them to sell their machines in the state of Ohio. Those contracts were to guarantee that the vendors would not sell their systems for less outside of Ohio than they sold them inside the state. ES&S, Diebold, and Hart Intercivic agreed. All others disagreed with the requirements.
Relying on the vendors to self-regulate and to train operators of their equipment is familiar to those who know how government works. Long before this tech existed, radar mfrs trained cops, conveniently ignoring the shortcomings of the equipment, portraying it as foolproof and accurate. This lead to police “testilying” to make cases. The same has been seen with voting machines, as seen here so many times.
Cometman
You opined, “Seems to be saying that the integrity of the certification process is somehow more important than the integrity of the actual vote count.”
In fact what Rodriguez is saying is that the EAC is not going to rush the voting system certification process just so new voting systems can be rushed out the door of the vendors. The EAC should be commended for holding firm under a lot of pressure from the vendors, their lobbying group, and some state and local election officials.
John Gideon
Thanks for explaining the pressures the EAC is under. I don’t want them to rush through anything, but I have to wonder why we are 10 weeks from election day and these problems haven’t been addressed yet. Even assuming that 2000 was the first time problems arose, which it wasn’t, there have been 8 years for Congress and other governmental bodies to act to fix the problem.
I’m sure Rodriguez is doing her best with what she’s been given to work with. But that the states would simply go ahead and used flawed machines because the EAC hasn’t finished the certification process is mind boggling to me.
Someone ought to be concerned about the integrity of the actual vote count and it doesn’t appear that anyone is taking that too seriously.
Cometman,
Until Jan. 2007 the EAC was not doing any voting system certification. The National Assoc. of State Election Directors (NASED) had a program of test labs testing the systems and a panel of volunteers reviewing the lab reports and qualifying those systems.
The NASED system was totally broken with the labs and vendors working together on the testing and the panel of volunteers [unqualified for the work they were doing] rubber-stamping the lab reports.
The EAC system is a lot more restrictive about lab/vendor contact as can be found by reading correspondence from the EAC to the labs warning them about conflict of interest. The labs are also under instructions to test the complete system.
Now, the fact that the EAC has done nothing about those flawed, NASED qualified systems is a problem that, apparently for the NYTimes article, the GAO has waded-in on. I also totally agree that it is a HUGE problem that states are using voting systems that they know are not accurate.